Assessing Impact in Collaborative Efforts for Social Change

Programs and program evaluators are increasingly being asked to demonstrate impact of program activities by funders and other careholders. In our experience, what is meant by “impact” is often poorly defined and often includes unrealistic expectations, both in terms of program impact and in terms of evaluation study design. Conducting ethical and appropriate impact studies requires having a clear definition of impact, broad careholder input, and methods suited for capturing longer-term and systems-level effects. In this Demonstration, we will briefly describe our program (in particular, the aspects of the program that are likely to be broadly relevant to other programs – e.g., multi-organizational collaboration, multi-pronged theory of change, and long-term investments in one or more communities), then describe our approach to defining and measuring impact, with a focus on equipping audience members with tools, literatures, and approaches that they could use to replicate such a study in their contexts.
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Meredith Meadows; Dana Marshall; Rebecca Selove; Melissa Luong; Ashmeet Oberoi; Calandra Whitted